WIP 01: Creature Raysarian sculpt

I've been wanting to start on some kind of a creature sculpt for a while now. Something scary, or something weird or just something interesting that wasn't human. So I did a couple of sketches and came up with this little guy.

He isn't a creepy monster like something from the awesome Casey Love's gallery, but I thought he was a interesting  friendly alien, maybe even a merchant of somekind. He is a bit of a Stingray/ manatee/ hammerhead mix of a creature. So I build up a low poly mesh from a human model that I had made from a past project, and brought it into ZBrush.

After a couple hours I got to the stage below. I also wanted to show off alittle of my zbrush work setup.

Then a few more hours on another day, I came to the stage below.

I'm going to continue to work on sculpting him and also I'll retopologize his head so I can have some more geometry. Then after the sculpting, I plan to texture and render him with zbrush.

PokéTrainers Academy

Where you go to be the very best, like no one ever was.

Another shirt design that I sold to For Human Peoples for print, check it out below: http://www.forhumanpeoples.com/collections/thedrawingboard/products/poketrainers-academy

Happy New Year

To begin the new year, I had the awesome oppuntunity to sell my first tshirt design! The design was to the website For Human Peoples (the same guys that run the Sourcefed youtube channel) and I got a 1 year long contract though winning their weekly themed design contest. The theme for that week was "the Hobbit" in anticipation for the next Hobbit movie.

The quote is from Bilbo in the first movie, he yells, "I'm Going on an Adventure!" as he leaves the Shire chasing after the dwarves and Gandalf. The design has little illusions from the movies and book hidden within and around the letters like Gollum,the Ring, the Dwarven treasure, and Smaug the Dragon.

The way these weekly contest work are people submit their designs for the theme, then the top 5 are chosen to be sold for a week on the website. Then the top sell of the week has their design sold for a year. I thought it was pretty cool just as a side thing I was doing, check out the For Human Peoples store to see my design and other great stuff.
http://www.forhumanpeoples.com/collections/shirts/products/going-on-an-adventure

Masked Child

This was an idea I thought up around Dia de los Muertos, which is a mexican holiday were people celebrate the lifes of their deceased loved ones. Food and drink and toys are left out in belief that the souls of the loved ones will visit for the celebration. The holiday is both a happy yet mysterious and a bit creepy, which is what I wanted to depict with this image.

Any character with their face concealed reads mysterious and creepy, especially children. But that is balanced out with the festival colors and the carnival like display in the background.

On the technical side, this was my first attempt at using Maya hair. below you can see the build up of it. by default it's very flat and blonde. I used the "puppet p_shader" plugin on the hair to have better control of the speculator and root/tip color. then, I bumped up the curly and frizzy values way up to give her a scraggly look, kind of like my own hair.

 The girl herself was modeled and textured in Zbrush. I modeled the whole face because although it wouldn't be seen, I wanted the eyes and eyeholes to appear in the right locate. The skin and face were then textured using ZApplink and photoshop with images. Then the low poly was transferred to Maya and displacement maps were created and applied.

Image Dump

This is a kind of an image dump of illustrations/graphics I created from the past 2 months. I did them all for creative challenge contests, just to entertain myself and to keep my mind and skills sharp. The kids at the bottom I think I might continue as a series by creating more baby versions of fictional characters in that style.

Blimp

For my second project while working at Ninjaneer, I got to work on a demo video for a company that makes these Zeppelin like blimps, filled with helium instead of hydrogen because as history shows us, that didn't go too well.

The project was to create a 2 min long demo in just 4 weeks and it was a fairly small team, just me and other guy. I was mostly the creative lead and divided the project to: week 1- previz, week 2- modeling and texturing, week 3- animation and lights, week 4- rendering and compositing/ pull hair out.
I don't think I can say too much more about the content of that video, but you can check out that blimp company's stuff on their website: http://www.theflyingyacht.com/

Also, below is a couple of stills and a demo of some of the comping I did for the project:

Art & Algorithms

It's been a LONG while since my last post. During this time I've been working on a couple projects here and there including working as a Cg generalist contractor for an animation studio, Ninjaneer. There I got to work on a 3D mapping projection project for the Art & Algorithms festival out in Titusville. The 7 min show was projected onto the side of a building and featured really cool effects, spacerockets, antigrav chambers, and dubstep beats.

For that project, I helped brainstorm and worked on all the storyboards. I also did the modeling for the rocket factory, Antigrav chamber, and the outdoor nature scenes. Here's a look at some stills from those scenes:

Also check out the full show on the Ninjaneer fb page, it's pretty cool stuff:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=422367274534176&set=vb.125171504253756&type=2&theater